Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with historian Elisabeth Engel, to speak about her experience writing her first book, Encountering Empire, on the lives of African American Missionaries in colonial Africa during the early twentieth century, and her thoughts on the subject since the monograph was published.

Whether they are thinking of bagels or Woody Allen, to many Americans, Jews are intimately connected, if not synonymous with New York. Jewish New York, an edited volume from New York University Press out this month, explores the historical developments that have led to this association and asks: "when and in what sense did New York become a city of promises for Jews"? The book is a condensed version of the prize-winning City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (2012), the first comprehensive history on the subject. Synthesizing three volumes into one single tome, it is also half the length, at 500 pages. The book, which contains essays by Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard B. Block, and Daniel Soyer, has greatly benefited from the careful editing of Deborah Dash Moore, a prominent historian of Jewish America. Organized into broad themes, the book is divided into four parts that follow a roughly linear chronological arc, from the colonial period to the present, with eleven chapters and a visual essay by art historian Diana L. Linden.

Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University in New York:1841 - 2003Thomas J. ShelleyFordham University Press, 2016$39.95

By Chris Stasnyiak

Rev. Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, a Fordham emeritus professor of church history, has put his keen research and writing skills to constructive use in Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University in New York. This history of the Bronx university, written as part of its 175th anniversary, is no short read. The narrative stretches to just over 500 pages. In less expert hands this would be a slog of a tome. But Shelley’s prose makes it a much quicker read, as it ranges over the school’s history, from its humble beginnings as St. John’s College (the Fordham name would come much later) in a relatively pastoral swath of southern Westchester County, to its current status as one of the top Catholic universities in the country.

Historian Mariah Adin’s new book tackles the story of Brooklyn’s so-called “thrill-kill gang,” a well-publicized case in 1954 involving four young Jewish Americans arrested and tried in relation to the deaths of two men in August of that year. After the trial, anti-comics crusaders used the case to attempt to outlaw violent comics in the state of New York. As someone who has studied the history of Jews and comics and New York City for years, this book sounded like a match made in heaven.

Members of the ACT UP Majority Action Committee demonstrate at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC in 1988. Their demands included that the drug approval process for AIDS treatments be shortened and that people from all affected populations, including women, people of color, poor people, and IV drug users, must be included in clinical trials. The t-shirts they designed and wore, "WE DIE -- THEY DO NOTHING" list in fine print that WE = "People of color, whether we are Afro-American, Native American, Hispanic, Latino, or Asian, women, men, IV drug users, partners of IV drug users, lesbians, gays, straights, the homeless, prisoners, and children affected by the AIDS crisis," while THEY = "Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Michael Dukakis, the NIH, the FDA, the U.S. Congress, the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucus, our national media, our national minority leaders. The border repeats "WE RECOGNIZE EVERY AIDS DEATH AS AN ACT OF RACIST, SEXIST, AND HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENCE." See footnotes for citation. Photo by and curtesy of Donna Binder.

By Tamar W. Carroll

While they have often been criticized for practicing narrowly focused, single-issue politics, AIDS activists correctly saw cultural and economic issues as linked and sought to combat both antigay sentiment and the ascending neoliberalism of the Reagan era.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS activists’ stunning visual art and spectacular street theater reshaped the social geography of Lower Manhattan, leading to a dynamic coalition between gay men, lesbians, and feminists supporting not only sexual freedom but also health care for all. The public art and dramatic street theater of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) and its ally, Women’s Health Action Mobilization! (WHAM!), brought once-isolated men and women together and gave them an immediate sense of connection. It also changed the way they experienced space in Lower Manhattan, producing a vocal and visible activist queer community that rejected established gender norms and embraced a fluid rather than fixed understanding of sexuality. Like previous gay rights advocates, queer activists reappropriated what had been a derogatory term for homosexuals and used it as a “sly and ironic weapon” against homophobia….[1]

Where do you live? What’s your place like? New Yorkers love talking about real estate. In a city where land is at a premium, recent articles about tiny houses, shared housing, poor doors, public housing, and the social consequences of housing all point to the everyday ramifications and moral valences of housing in New York and elsewhere. To talk about housing –- in New York City especially -– is to have a conversation about religion, not only as a site of ultimate meaning, but of ritual practice and identity formation. This intensity about where and how to live is not new to our generation of New Yorkers, however. One largely forgotten form of housing offered a popular –- if controversial –- solution for New Yorkers throughout the nineteenth century: the boardinghouse.

The story should be familiar to the reader, having been etched into most people’s minds through constant repetition in the days following the attacks, and in the fourteen years that have passed since: on the morning of September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked and sent to strike at targets in New York City and Washington, D.C. Three of the planes reached their destinations, one crashed in a Pennsylvania field, after its passengers rose up and stopped the hijackers.The attacks themselves were intensely visual, shown again and again in thousands of photographs and countless hours of video. Among the media that responded immediately was comics, where stories of 9/11 have been told in many different ways over the years.

By Luke J. FederOn the evening of November 5, 1755, New Yorkers paraded through the city streets with effigies of the Pope, Pretender, and Devil. The revelers had propped up the effigies on a bier and had ensured that each was “hideously formed, and as humourously contrived.” As the festivities continued, the Devil disingenuously offered his respects to the Pope, but then used his pitchfork to “thrust his Holiness on the Back.” Meanwhile, the Pretender lingered patiently for the Pope’s orders. Participants continued through the streets with effigies in tow. The Seven Years’ War between Britain and France had begun roughly a year before, so New Yorkers stopped at the temporary home of Jean Erdman, the Baron Dieskau, a captured general for the French army. The baron sought “to prevent Mischief” by giving the crowd “some Silver.” In response, members of the crowd yelled, “Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!” Lastly, they “march’d off to a proper Place, and set Fire to the Devil’s Tail, burning the Three to Cinders.”[1]